Time Is the Only Thing Truly Ours
The Teaching
Ita fac, mi Lucili: vindica te tibi — Do this, my Lucilius: claim yourself for yourself.
Gather and save the time which till lately was being cut away from you, stolen from you, or which slipped away. Convince yourself of the truth of what I say: some moments are torn from us, some gently removed, and some glide beyond our reach.
Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est — Everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; time alone is ours.
Philosophy will teach us to learn how to die — and by learning how to die, to learn how to live. The person who learns to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
Commentary
Time alone is ours, Seneca’s great insight is that present attention is the only real possession. Everything else is ultimately outside our control. Only the present moment of consciousness is unambiguously ours.
This is ‘Be Here Now’ in Latin. It is the Shinto awareness of Ma, the sacred interval, the present moment as the locus of the sacred. It is the Buddhist teaching on impermanence: everything is constantly flowing away, and the attempt to hold it creates suffering.
Shinto’s awareness of Mono no Aware, the pathos of things, the beauty of transience, is Seneca’s philosophy applied aesthetically. The cherry blossom is beautiful precisely because it falls. The moment is precious precisely because it passes.
Themes
Connections 9
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape. Their worlds touched after Alexander, but no Stoic text shows Buddhist influence, or the reverse.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Shinto and Stoicism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Stoicism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Indigenous tradition and Stoicism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Greek thought reached Stoicism by 300 BCE. Stoicism is a Greek school, founded in Athens c. 300 BCE. It took its fire and its Logos from Heraclitus.